The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A SUMMER GOOD TALK -- IT'S ALL HERE, FROM COVID TO POILIEVRE TO TRUDEAU TO TRUMP

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

Chantal and Bruce take a break from their summer routine to join me for a special summer Good Talk.  We touch a lot of bases from the Covid surge and does anyone care; to the battles inside both the Conservative and Liberal parties, to the latest on the January 6th committee.  Enjoy.

Are you ready for some summer good talk? Well, of course you're ready. It's time for good talk. It's been a month since we we had our last good talk, but the gang is back in, ready to rock one more time. Chantel is on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, up near Rimouski. She's been on, taking a little bit of a break, but she's managed to connect. We are connected. Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Stratford, Ontario.

And we're going to start with a few words about COVID and I'll explain why. You know, I don't want to go into a big soliloquy here, but here's why. We're in a surge. There's no question about that. Everybody agrees with that. All the public health officials say there's a bit of a surge going on with the new variant, the BA5 variant, the latest one, very transmissible. A lot of people are getting it. I'm sure either you have or friends of yours have had COVID in the last, I don't know, couple of weeks, months. I know I've had it.

Joining Chantel, of the three of us, Chantel had it quite some time ago and so did most of her family. I've had it in the last couple of weeks. And it was, as they say, a mild case. But you have to monitor these things. And as I'm in my 70s, I was put on Paxlovid, just like President Biden was put on Paxlovid yesterday when it was determined that he had COVID.

And the Paxlovid worked for me really well. Bang. The thing was over in a couple of days. But I was one of that percentage who got the rebound, the Paxlovid rebound. Four or five days later, it all sort of came back at me, kind of stronger than the first go-round, really. But still over, you know, when you really look at it,

it was pretty mild, the whole experience. But I can tell you that I certainly thank the fact that I've had a couple of vaccines, a couple of boosters, and that Paxlovid, the antiviral, was available to me. Made the whole thing easier, if you want to use that term. Okay, enough about me. What is the surge? Thank God. Yeah, I know what you're thinking here.

This is... I don't know. Do we still have time left? How about we go to politics instead of your help? I was trying to be transparent. You know, kind of a mix of transparency and heroism that I'd faced the great plague and knocked it down. Anyway, enough on that stuff about me.

Here's the question. Bruce, why don't you start us? I know you've got some new data. How concerned should governments be about this new wave, this new surge? And as a result of concern, is there likely to be any change in the approach of governments? Are we going back to an era of mandates, et cetera, et cetera? Well, the first thing, of course, is that the question of how concerned government should be about this surge should never be a question put to me because I don't know anything about medicine

and disease. However, I do know that we're dealing, in terms of the public mindset, we're dealing with such a different situation from at the beginning of this pandemic. When we first heard about this pandemic and saw and heard that it was approaching our shores, we didn't know anything about it. We didn't have any experience of it. We knew that it was potentially going to kill a lot of people and that there was no medicine available to either reduce the spread of it or to deal with the consequences. Fast forward to today, by our latest data, roughly 7 million Canadians are sure that they have had COVID. Most of those people report that their experiences were symptomatically mild or almost non-existent. But a third of them said that they had bad or very bad symptoms.

There's another 3 million who say, I think I've had it, but I'm not sure. And then there's others who say, I don't think I did, but I possibly did, or I'm sure I did it. So there's a lot of people who believe that they know now what COVID represents as a threat to them. And a lot of them believe that the use of vaccinations has made it a less worrying phenomena. A lot of them also feel that the intrusions in our lives might have been the right idea, but might not be as necessary now. And so if you're in government, you have a real dilemma, which is on the one hand, you do see another surge. You do see hospitalization levels going up. You do know that this disease is killing people every day,

but you also know that for many people in the public, including many people who genuinely are not anti-vaxxers, they're thoughtful people, they care about other folks, but boy, they're not really looking forward to the introduction of more measures. Our latest data on that point, and I'll finish on this, is that, you know, only about 20% say do whatever you need to do, including even if it means going back to a version of life as we existed earlier in the pandemic. A lot more people, about 50%, say do what you think is right, but don't push too hard. And that is the kind of the main setting now in Canadian public opinion. And it presents a dilemma for governments. It certainly says, whatever you're going to do, if you feel like you need to mandate it, expect some pushback.

If you can do what you need to do by encouraging people, it's likely to be more successful from a social science standpoint. But again, I don't think that public opinion alone obviously should be the deciding factor here. But public opinion is essential unless you have a consensus backing you, which I believe no government has to impose stricter measures or a return to the kind of measures that we saw last winter, you are not going to succeed. There is a point where you need to bring public opinion on side. And at this point, it's not there to be had. Not even for a discussion. I just spent three days holed up on top of some mountain with about 40 people.

And I'm sure most of them were, you know, rule-abiding, not anti-vax people. Not only did COVID never come up, but the notion that people wanted to think about this incoming surge was not on the radar. When I came down, I turned my radio on and I heard the Quebec public health officers say, well, yes, we're in the middle of a surge, but we think it's under control. We expect hospitalizations to peak in about two weeks. And that's basically that. And I think what governments are doing at this point is they're keeping their powder dry for the fall and for a

serious push in the fall for another vaccination campaign, which is certainly the thing to do, because if you seriously think about it, we may be in a surge in summer, but it's well known that fall and winter are more prone to the spread of viruses. So optimally, you would want people to come back to school and work after Labor Day thinking, I'm going to get another vaccine and possibly a vaccine that is more adjusted to the Omicron variant and that potentially provides a better response. But to the question, should governments be thinking at any point over the next between now and Labor Day about imposing new measures? I don't believe that's realistic. I think they would be blowing ammunition that they probably will need in the fall.

I think you made the key point in that, which is at the moment, the vaccines that are being offered Canadians do not attack this new variant. They're not after the BA5 and they're still developing that. That's still being developed by the various drug companies.

But they all expect it to be ready in the fall. So I hear you and I agree with you that that's probably the focus in terms of vaccine-wise. Prepare people for, you know, we're going to have something in the fall and we should all be taking it. It's just going to be like your annual flu shot and blah blah blah all that stuff um but let me ask you both a question and i i ask this risking full well that you'll both as you'd love to do dump all over me but we we already have i know well we just want to keep the string going the um this issue about the importance of what the people are thinking um on a decision like this i i want to try and understand this when the the the the political figures or the medical figures or whoever they are enter that room the decision

room on things like this should the first question they ask be, well, what can the people handle right now? What are they thinking? What do they want? Should that really be the first question that's asked? It's their job to achieve a balance. I mean, the optimum public health measures probably are not what we are living through at this point.

But you do need, and it is the job of political leaders to think in those terms. You do think about balancing mental health concerns. I mean, I don't think people are mentally ready to be told that they're going to stay home and wear masks whenever they go to the grocery store. That is a fact. It is also a health issue. become experts that you hear like the public health pundits that we've become familiar with over the course of the campaign are also taking a very different attitude and tone to how you deal with this latest surge because they don't believe we're going to live in a COVID-free world. And they don't think that this is a realistic public health objective. So they're trying or waiting, as Bruce said, with the increasing evidence to see if this becomes as common as the cold.

It may get worse than a cold, but it may be that it becomes common. And that's a reality that means that governments have to take into account that you can't lock down people for decades to come in fear of something that most people do not fear as much as they did at this point. I think that I'm largely in the same place. I guess I think that it isn't the first question that should be asked. The first question that always should be asked is, do we have a health problem where we need to do something specifically to save people's lives? is yes but then what which goes directly to the second question which is what sorts of solutions can you fashion in a democracy where people do have freedom to choose what they're going to do and what they're not going to do and how do you build social cohesion around solutions that might save more lives by looking not at mandates so much, but as other forms of persuasion, encouragement, information, reminders, all of that kind of thing, which I think is the phase that we're

heading into now because we are now dealing with the population that believes that it knows what this represents in terms of a risk to themselves and to other people. And there is politics around it because we live in a competitive political dynamic and we're heading into a fall where the election of Pierre Poliev, likely as it seems as leader of the Conservative Party, would like nothing better than to have the opportunity to campaign against mandates. Now, having said that, I do think that I always have to spare a thought for people in government who know that if they don't do certain things, more people will die of this than would otherwise. And I think that if you're in government, that burden of responsibility feels pretty heavy. It feels quite weighty. And there will be people

in those meetings saying things like, if you don't do this, more people will die. And if you're a politician, that's a very bad conversation to find yourself into because you know that that's true. And you also know that there's only so much that you will be able to do about it and that history will judge the choices that you make. And the yardsticks that history will use might not be as sensitive to the political dynamic that we observe and are talking about this morning. So I wouldn't minimize how difficult it is. I think it's the right functions of government to weigh these considerations and come to the best solutions. And I think public opinion is a big part of it, but it isn't necessarily the first question.

Do you think the dynamic in those decision rooms has changed as a result of what we've been through in the last couple of years? In terms of the order of those questions that are being asked of themselves and the answers they're getting. A hundred percent. I mean, you can't have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and slowed the economy and anesthetized all kinds of activity without realizing that it's caused a lot of ripple effects. And ripple is probably too small a word to describe what's happening with inflation and the resumption of normal business activity. And so those consequences are real and they're felt every day and they have enormous impact

on people's lives. So many of the variables are different. The conversation needs to be different. The politics of it are different. And it's almost like we're not talking about the same thing. We're talking about Canada in 2022. That's a very different place relative to this infection, this virus, than Canada in 2020. All right. Last point from you, Chantal, before we move on? No, I was thinking as Bruce was talking about casualties, you know, you drive up for a thousand kilometres

and you're driving through villages and towns. I'm familiar with the area I'm in. And you can see the casualties of COVID, the places that didn't make it, the places. And hidden in this, of tourism and economic activity and labor shortages, so many jobs on offer, there is a lot of damage when you really look around you that is not repaired, and that probably won't be repaired. So for governments, all of that, that wasn't in the balance two years ago. We are not the same people and the same economy and the same country that we were before the

pandemic. We only look like that. It's kind of a false normal that we're living in. That's interesting. That certainly gives us all things to think about. All right. We are going to get to politics. We're going to talk some Conservative Party of Canada

and some Liberal Party of Canada politics. But first, we're going to talk for this summer we've been off for a month we're happy to be here today and we'll be back again one month from now near the end of august but today we're tackling all the big issues because it's summer and you want to talk politics. I know you're sitting on your dock, or you're in the backyard barbecue, or you're touring the country like Chantel is. But you need that hit.

You need that little bit of political junkie stuff that you love. A little bit of politics talk, so let's do it now. I'm looking at the headline in, well, it's the Toronto Star that I'm looking at. And the headline is, Pierre Poliev blasts Conservative Party's call for third leadership debate. You look at that and you go, well, yeah, of course he does, because he's leading, supposedly, and why of course he does. Cause he's, he's leading supposedly. And why would you want another debate risk anything?

Or you look at it and you say, what the heck? What is he? Is he a wimp? Is he chicken? What's the way, what's the matter with the guy? Why not have another debate? I mean, the thing's been going on for a couple of months. There's still a month and a half roughly to go.

Why shouldn't there be another debate? But he's blasted his party again. He's been good at that. And I guess for some conservatives, they love the sound of that. I guess if he can hit his own party, surely he can hit the liberals if he gets into that position. And there's nothing conservatives love better than a leader who will bash liberals so i don't know what are we uh to make of this chantal what are we to make of the fact that uh they want a third debate or at least some members apparently want a third debate but pierre polyev says you've heard enough of me already you don't need to hear me

anymore in a debate format uh there is the decision and there is the manner of the decision. And both, and Bruce can correct me if I'm wrong, but both are unprecedented in the leadership campaign of one of our major national parties in the sense of the frontrunner declining to debate and then turning his guns on his own party and on one of his main rival in a way that is so dismissive that you kind of wonder whether he can, the Poiliev camp can hit lower when they're setting their sights on Justin Trudeau, because if that is what they think of fellow conservatives,

what are people who did not vote for the conservative party to think about how welcome they are to support that party? I mean, so the decision to not participate, I mean, almost two-thirds of Conservative members who participated in, they were consulted and participated in the consultation wanted this debate to take place. And it's normal to have a debate one month before the votes are, or in the process of the votes being cast. That is just par for the course. It should be a no-brainer, the debate, and it should have been scheduled early on in the campaign.

Plus, all those new members, presumably, that are so welcome in the party that wanted to vote for Patrick Brown might want to check out the alternatives and that you might want to keep on side. So the rationale for another debate was good. The manner. We have now reached the point where Pierre Poiliev and his organizers are making conservatives uneasy about being in the conservative party that he might be leading a month and a half from now. That's particular. The assumption seems to be that it doesn't matter that you make a number of conservatives who happen not to be in the Koyef camp or to be watching from the sidelines

uncomfortable because they have no other place to go and come election time, they will have to vote for the Conservative Party. I think all in all, it's a cheap, undignified way to run a frontrunner campaign, and there will be political costs attendant to it at some point down the line, possibly not on the day when the next leader is chosen, but a lot of bad blood is accumulating, and no one, as you know from covering politics, no one stays on top forever.

And once you're not on top, you do need the people that you didn't need on the way up to not want to help you on the way down to go further down more quickly. You got that right. That applies to so many things right not just politics i just want to clip what she said and just let let's run that over and over and over again that was very very well put sorry pierre did you want to no no i was going to just pass the baton to you to to see what you know here's here's what i i mean i i'm as you know in my 60s now and had a landmark birthday not very long ago and i i guess i still i you know people would say i shock easily but i don't shock that often and i'm shocked by uh what i'm seeing and by the

polyev campaign because uh it sort of says a few things to me. One is that you would normally, first of all, if your whole theme is freedom, the idea that you don't want to have debates and you've made it clear that you don't want to have debates is hardly synonymous with this idea of let's have a free flowing kind of democracy where everybody gets to hear the different thoughts that people have and decide whether they like them or not. This is a kind of a use of the term freedom that is extremely controlled in terms of how this campaign is presenting itself. And that's kind of weird to watch. But more particularly, I was reading these comments, the viciousness towards Tom Clark about the way that the last debate was run, the gratuitous, cheap, personal insult of Jean Charest that didn't need to be done. You don't need to say no this way.

And so when you say no this way, you're trying to make a point. This is a feature, not a bug of the Polyev campaign and the person running it. And I don't think it's fair to separate really the person running it from the campaign because it's in his name and it's been going on for months in largely the same way. And I kind of, I was thinking about this because, you know, Peter, you and I have played a lot of rounds of golf together over 30 years, let's say, and every time we finish a round of golf, what do we do? We take our caps off and we shake hands with each other, which is kind of a weird ritual, but that's what we do because it's part of the culture of a competition. And I'm watching this leadership and I'm thinking leadership races used

to be more like boxing, where there was a sense of rules and a kind of an attitude towards your opponent. But when it was over, you wanted to be able to congratulate the other person and be a little bit gentle to the person that you beat. This is more like mixed martial arts. This is a no-holds-barred, do everything that you can to damage, destroy, ruin the other person, and kind of expect a certain gleefulness from your supporters from it. And if that's working, it signals a political movement that as a large chunk of the world is saying, we need more kindness. And a smaller part of the world says, we need more meanness. I don't know what kind of a party follows somebody who leads in this way,

but I don't like what it represents in terms of the contribution it would make to politics, medium and longer term. But having said all that, I do think Chantal's right, which is if you show Canadians this often enough, at some point they'll react to it

and say, that isn't what we want. And I don't know when that will be. And I don't know if it'll be after an election in which Pierre-Paul Lievre wins. Anything's possible. But this is extremely worrying fuel for our politics as a country, this style of prosecuting a leadership campaign. Is it the style that's more worrying or is it the fact that it's winning yeah but it's winning and the confines the small confines of a leadership campaign talk about hundreds of thousands of members all you want it looks like the people's party doesn't it it doesn't look like the conservative party but i mean i i i'm gonna draw an analogy that goes back to the 80s and the abortion debates. The pro-life movement was always very, very effective in smaller rooms to elect a hospital board, to select school board members, to pick candidates for an election, including within the Liberal Party. But once that same dynamics started playing out on a larger stage, the stage of a general election, and I'm not just talking federal elections here, I'm also talking about Ontario

elections that I've watched, where pro-choice candidates in an era when it was not popular to be that, I'll name Eleanor Kaplan, who ran as a Liberal somewhere in Don Mills as pro-choice in those days against a clearly pro-life Conservative, and not only won her seat, but eventually became a Cabinet Minister in Ontario. So you can play to that small group. It is a small group when you take the entire electorate and win a leadership campaign. Whether that is good for the party you are doing it to is a completely different question. Here's another analogy. Justin Trudeau won the liberal leadership hands down in no small part because he was a rock star. And he brought

a hell of a lot of people who did not, you know, lick stamps in the days that people did that for the Liberal Party to vote. And if Justin Trudeau had not been in sync with the history of the Liberal Party, he could have taken over that party and transformed it completely. But a lot of liberals would have looked at it and said, this isn't my party anymore. I don't feel at home. Or a lot of voters might have said, this isn't, you know, this is not how we see the liberal party. social media era, makes them prone to be caught by marginal groups that eventually will turn off more of the voters they need to secure a governing majority than the alternative. So it matters how you win, not just because you shake hands at the end of the game, but because when you win, people who have looked at you winning have to say, I think I like this guy or this woman, and I'd really like to be part of his club.

If you spend the entire campaign saying, we don't actually want anyone that's not like us, and we think they're all scared of us so that's why they're saying all this about us or they're all misguided nasty they have wrong ideas well in the end you're going to empty out the room yeah well you know it's going to be fascinating to watch these next roughly six or seven weeks of the conservative leadership campaign. There appears there may be this debate, but at the moment, only three people are going to be in it. I remember we talked about this a while ago, and I was sort of thinking this campaign is going to splinter the conservative movement. And I thought it two months ago, and I thought it a month ago.

And then after last night's kind of ridiculous choice by the Polyev campaign. It's just become even more clear to me. I talked to a lot of people who are inclined to re-engage with the Conservative Party in this leadership campaign. Obviously there's a huge number of hundreds of thousands of Canadians who've decided to do that. And a lot of them are really fatigued with the Trudeau government and they don't like what they see is too far adrift to the left and not as much fiscal responsibility as they want.

But in the last several weeks, a number of them have just said, what the Conservative Party looks like it's about to do just doesn't work for us. And they're not saying that in the way that people do. And they sometimes go, well, you know, my side isn't going to win this leadership, but it's still my party and I'll be there for it when push comes to shove. They're not talking like that. They're saying this is the creation of the people's party using the financial and organizational resources of the much larger conservative party. And we're not interested in that. So I do think it still could be a competitive alternative, depending on the level of fatigue and frustration with the incumbent liberals, but not because people in large numbers are looking for the solution that was encapsulated in that statement by the Poliev campaign.

People generally are not interested in that kind of vituperative, small ball, inside politics nonsense. They want to know when's inflation going to come down? What about interest rates? Are they going to keep going up? And is my house going to become unaffordable? Where are the jobs coming from in the long term? What kind of government could we count on from the conservatives if we replace the liberals with them? And I don't see any of that really being at the heart of this leadership debate

or this leadership campaign by Pierre Polyev. I do see Jean Charest trying to do some of it, sometimes occasionally lurching into things like we should have a national inquiry on the COVID response, which I don't know, doesn't sort of do much for me as a big policy idea when everything else seems a little bit more urgent. But I just don't know how the Conservatives kind of pull out of this after Poliev wins, especially when he says he's not going to change if he does win this leadership. This is who he is. This is how he intends to campaign. Can I just add a word about Jean Charest? And it's anecdotal evidence, but it's been interesting that, you know, and I'm not sure that the Poitiers people or those who are in charge of the Poitiers campaign

and its messaging have picked up on it, but in Quebec, by and large, what you are seeing is what redemption looks like. You'll have people come to you and say, wouldn't Jean Charest make a great contender against Justin Trudeau? Wouldn't he clean out the liberals? No one, and people nod, no one is saying Jean Charest, you know, he's done, he's, all the words that were used in the Poilievre press release yesterday are so out of sync with the evolution of perception towards Jean Charest

in Quebec, that they are coming perilously close. And it's July, and that's probably fortunate to triggering the us against them reflex. Our own is not good enough for you, then your party is not good enough for us. That is what they're courting. I don't think they see it. And when you tell people, I don't think Chagall is going to win, they're not saying, well, this Polyev guy is really interesting. They just look puzzled that you wouldn't want someone who can beat Justin Trudeau to lead the Conservative Party. I don't know. I'd be curious to hear John Baird or Senator Roussakos,

who are on side and part of the so-called brain trust of the Poitiers campaign, how they feel about the way that the messaging is increasingly becoming. You can dislike Jean Charest all you want, but there are things that you need to know if you're going to wait in a place where he is the best known candidate and increasingly the one considered the most likely by many ordinary voters who are not playing politics as liable to be Justin Trudeau. It would be interesting to hear what Baird and Houssakis have to say. Neither one have been shy in the past about going for the jugular

in different political battles. But this is a different tone to things. And it does make you wonder, and this is not a discussion for today, but where we are in this whole process in canada picking leaders and and the whole debate structure whether it's during leadership campaigns or during election campaigns we haven't found the magic you know the magic formula to make these things workable and smart um for individuals you say what you want about Paul Yev and his trashing of the first formal debate on the Conservative Party, but I thought it was a disastrous debate format.

But whatever. I don't think anywhere have we found that magic formula for debates, for either leadership campaigns or elections okay i um you you both touched on a little bit i just want to spend a couple of minutes on the other party that one with the leader with the new haircut um we talked a month ago about the problems they were having and the internal divisions that were being created by some of those problems. Has anything changed in the first half of summer on that front inside the Liberal Party? Who wants to go first on this?

Bruce. Go ahead, Chantal. Yes, that probably tells you all you need to know that we're not fighting each other to have the first word on this. I've been off and looking from a distance. It feels more like, you know, it feels like the summer relief team is in charge. And for summer relief purposes, it works. The prime minister I took or I found has been more visible in all kinds of ways than I expected

for a post-difficult year, July. I see how they've struggled. I think probably one of the bigger decisions and the harder decision has been dealing with the turbine and Ukraine and Germany. I think Canada was in a tough bind and they were probably happy it was July. But beyond that, I couldn't tell you that I see or I pick up signals

that anything significant is taking place. And no, I don't believe that they are getting ready for a fall election. Yeah, that's got to be the biggest, the craziest story. I mean, this come to, you know, elections stories often come up in the summer because there's nothing else to write about. But this one seems bizarre that it, that not only did it get mentioned, but it took on the kind of steam that it took on i don't get it um bruce it must be the summer i didn't even notice the steam that it took on it's just seen when i saw somebody write a headline with it i thought that's the mischief that people find for themselves

in the summer when there's nothing else that it occurs to them to talk about but um i i think that the um look i said before the break that i think the government has been in kind of a defensive posture for a few years now i don't think that it has been at its best in terms of setting a a clear and understandable agenda for people other than around COVID. And in the post-COVID time, if that's what it can be said that we're in, I think that it serves the government well in the near term that people are predisposed to think about other things and do other things this summer. Because if they were really focused on how are we going to deal with inflation, what is the economy going to look like in the future? What do we make of the fact that the United States seems to have lost its bearings?

There would be a greater expectation, a more urgent expectation for a kind of a plan for the country than I think is really being provided right now. I happen to think that the government has been a bit asleep at the switch in terms of talking about the cost of food, the cost of gas, the cost of housing as it relates to interest rates. I think those are the issues that are perplexing to people. And when I look around the front bench of the government right now, I don't see a finance minister who's been terribly prominent in helping explain the way in which the world is working and how this is likely to go for Canadians who are anxious. And in other times, maybe it would carry a bigger political price than it does right now.

But that doesn't mean that that price doesn't accumulate over time. And we put out our latest political data, which didn't show much change, but it did show a kind of a gentle inching up of dissatisfaction with government, of negative feelings about the prime minister. And I think as they head into the fall, the liberals are going to be facing an internal conversation that is necessary about are they going to rejuvenate? Are they going to establish a more clear sense of getting down to the business that really matters to Canadians? Maybe a little bit less of the epic ambition and a little bit more of the grind out the details of everyday life and make sure that things work services work that we're not buying lawn chairs so that people waiting in lines for passports can sit more comfortably as they wait these interminable waits and i i don't know how that's going to turn out because this is a government that does have some miles behind it and that takes its toll in terms of energy and clarity and discipline.

But I think that's what they all, as they find a moment or two during the summer to reflect on what the fall and winter needs to look like, I think that is the right conversation for them to be thinking about heaven. And that means that they should not be presenting another speech from the throne, because the last thing you want is another solid dose of lofty rhetoric with a lot of cut and paste from the previous one, followed up by little action or little immediate action. This is a government that is always about to do something. And then you wait. But now it's been, what, seven years about to do something. I want to know, for instance, how our climate strategy tailors in with the shift and the focus of the discussion on energy

because of Ukraine and Europe. That does matter. It's not good enough to just have a photo op to say, hey, people who have been paying the carbon tax, your check just came in. How do we move forward on all this? The debate, the conversation has changed on this. I didn't think that their response to the premiers on healthcare

was actually worthy of a government that is serious about health care. They sounded like a broken record, as if they were blind or playing a tune while, you know, fiddling while Rome burns. So all of those things, Bruce is right, July is a gift. But we all know that come Labor Day, the mood will change. There will be a Quebec election, most likely. Justin Trudeau's best friend will be re-elected with a strong mandate, François Legault. Doug Ford is waiting for his pal to be re-elected. John Horgan, a strong ally, considering

the rest of the lineup is gone i it's it's kind of a wake up and smell the coffee moment i believe that is coming up on them chantelle hits another one over the fence that's a good game especially when she said bruce is right i wish i could clip that and just put up together meme together and use it over and over again. You know what she'll never say? She'll never say, Peter was right about that. Exactly. I've never heard those words. She's not going to say it now either when I say to her that I love that analogy Bruce gave earlier about boxing.

And you put the two boxers in the ring and at the end of it all what happens is a you know they congratulate each other and i was thinking of that this week because i reread the story of henry moore now both of you are far too young to remember who henry moore was but henry moore was the british heavyweight champion who fought a young Cassius Clay in 1963. And this was before Clay became Muhammad Ali and before Clay became the world heavyweight champion. But he was highly regarded and he was a character and we all know that. And he never lost a fight. He'd never been knocked down. And there in the fourth round of his fight with Henry Moore,

getting ready for the championship fight against Sonny Liston, Henry Moore hit Clay so hard it dropped him like that. And he was down, not for the count, but he was down. And the pictures live through history of the stunned look on his face and of the crowd they couldn't believe that this brit had knocked out or not knocked out but knocked down um cassius clay and here's the thing about that you know clay ended up knocking more out in the next round and it was all over but those two guys remained friends for the rest of their lives and they both lived into the 2000s and every time one would visit the other's country they would spend time

together they'd go out just the two of them for dinner and they maintained this friendship stayed in contact all these years and all as a result for some degree of the fact that moore had clocked clay when nobody expected it in the fourth round of that fight so there's your little boxing moment of history i know chantelle is she's really engaged by that and is looking forward probably to writing a couple of columns on that i'm trying to think peter was right will be the headline of that column. The better point of Joe Clark and Pierre Trudeau. No, I don't think so.

Okay. We're going to take our last break and then we're going to come back and talk about something else that Chantel loves to talk about. The January 6th Committee. All right, we're back for our final go-around. It's a short one, four or five minutes here to close out this special summer edition of Good Talk. Reminder, we will have another summer edition of Good Talk. Reminder, we will have another summer edition of Good Talk. It'll be in late August, and we look forward to doing that. I think it's August 26th. I don't have the actual date in front of me right now, but it's somewhere in there. The Friday of whatever that week is. Okay, last night, was it the 8th?

The series of January 6th committee hearings, all have been in some degree blockbusters, but there wasn't anything I felt significantly new. But as time wore on through it, I realized that in fact what was new was that they were really painting the picture of what they thought Donald Trump was and why he was responsible for everything that happened on January 6th and that he should be held accountable

for what happened on January 6th and that he should be held accountable for what happened on January 6th. I know you watched Bruce. Chantel was kind of trapped by the travels that she's doing, so I'm not sure how much she saw. Give me a couple of minutes, Max, Bruce, on your thoughts about what we witnessed yesterday. After hoping for the Mueller inquiry and the first impeachment hearing, or maybe it was the second to be those moments of drama in politics that,

you know, wake woke people up to the reality that they had a terrible president. And then watching them fail. I was not sure that this was going to succeed as an exercise, but I am now convinced that it is the best piece of political management and presentation that I've ever seen in my life. It's extraordinary in the way that it's produced. It has me desperately hoping for another season. It's the best thing that I've watched on TV this summer, and I've watched quite a lot of things on television this summer, as most people have.

But I think the more important part, in a way, obviously, is what is it telling us? And I had confessed that I thought Trump had animated people to the point where they did these crazy things on January 6th. But I thought he was such an incompetent that it was wrong to imagine that he had really designed and planned for it to be an insurrection. But now I think, yes, he's still incompetent, but he did design and plan for it to be an insurrection. And the evidence last night and the way that it was presented was really compelling that everyone around him was saying, hey, there's an insurrection and. I'm not here to stop it. I don't want to stop it. They're doing the things that I want them to do, and they should overthrow Congress. I think that is, even by Donald Trump's standards, shocking and appalling. And I'm glad that America is seeing it. I don't know if America is going to do anything useful with that information, but at least it's being presented to them over and over and over again

in vivid, vivid detail, and I'm happy to see that. Chantal, thoughts? And it's a reminder that even if you are incompetent, if you are the President of the United States, you have so many levers at your disposal and access to so many ways of influencing events that your incompetence is more than offset by your power. That's one thing. There is no television in my room here, and I have had no access to anything that was internet for three days.

And I'm convinced that Bruce's take on this is totally accurate in the sense that he is a political expert at watching stuff like that. I will just note, though, that Bruce is part of a receptive audience to the message that he is getting. And that's not a criticism, but confirmation bias does exist. I'm just curious as to whether it has the impact that it should have on the less receptive audience, the jury that is out there that is not part of that, or whether it's confirmation bias would go the way that they are persecuting a hero type of reaction. But it is a really fascinating political exercise. To go from Watergate to this says a lot about the United States in not a great way, but says a lot also about how politics is covered and how it evolves. One of the bits of genius about the way that the presentation has been going,

including last night, is it's Republicans who are delivering the hardest blows to Trump. And in some cases, it's his own family in the clips. And last night, the young woman who testified, who started her testimony by saying, I'm a lifelong Republican. I thought that was another very compelling blow because to Chantal's point, it would otherwise be completely easy for Republicans having been schooled by Fox News and just their general political climate to disregard a lot of this. But I think they're hearing from a lot of Republicans who say, we have a sense of

honor and duty to the Constitution and to the institutions. And that's what this conservative movement has often in times relied on as kind of a reason for being. And it's been violated by this guy. So I think that's the right conversation. And you know, it's not just mostly Republicans who have been delivering the blows in these hearings. It's only Republicans who have been delivering the blows in these hearings. It's quite remarkable on that front. And it's hard for Republicans to come to grips with that, who are still trying to defriend Trump. That's it for this special summer edition of Good Talk.

Glad you're with us and hope you will be with us again in about a month's time. I'm Peter Mansbridge for Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson. Have a great summer.